


Revival (of Hearts and Minds Alike)

by Star_Going_Supernova



Category: Bendy and the Ink Machine
Genre: Bendy doesn't know what's going on and that Pisses Him Off, Gen, Hopeful Ending, Nasty Intruder Not as Nasty as Previously Suspected, Not Really Character Death, Temporary Character Death, but it's not, he just wants to rid the world of nasty former employees, is that too much to ask for?, this was probably meant to be pretty angsty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-09
Updated: 2018-01-09
Packaged: 2019-03-02 19:08:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13324608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Star_Going_Supernova/pseuds/Star_Going_Supernova
Summary: Revival— a restoration to bodily or mental vigor, to life or consciousnessThe ink trickled away, leaving Bendy alone in the corridor. That was the end of it, and with a single nod, he turned and continued on aimlessly, trudging along. Perhaps he’d go bother Alice or something.Only— that wasn’t the end of it.





	Revival (of Hearts and Minds Alike)

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt from liliflower137 on tumblr: _If I might make a small request, your take on what happens when Henry respawns?_
> 
> I ran with it, and while it doesn’t linger too much on Henry’s actual experience between death and revival, I’m quite happy with how this turned out. :)

Bendy screeched at the sight of the intruder, immediately setting off in pursuit. The man was obviously injured, and he limped nearly as badly as Bendy himself. It was all too easy to catch up to him before he could find a Little Miracle Station, and with a quick twist, the intruder’s neck snapped. 

Satisfied with a job well done, Bendy stood back and watched as ink surged up from the floor to engulf the man. As with all the others, he’d be absorbed into the hive mind, occasionally taking the form of a Searcher or, if he was very unlucky, a copy of a Butcher gang member. 

The ink trickled away, leaving Bendy alone in the corridor. That was the end of it, and with a single nod, he turned and continued on aimlessly, trudging along. Perhaps he’d go bother Alice or something. 

Only— that wasn’t the end of it.

When he sensed footsteps on Level 11, he assumed he’d somehow missed the arrival of a second intruder, but when he emerged from his wall portal, he caught sight of the same man as from before. 

The intruder glared at him as he pressed the button to close the lift doors, sealing himself away from Bendy. 

How was that possible? Everyone who died here became part of the living ink in some way. Why hadn’t this man? 

Bendy managed to seize the back of the intruder’s shirt several close calls later, right before his prey could hide in one of those darned Stations. This time, instead of snapping his neck, Bendy clamped his palm over the man’s mouth and nose, smothering him to death. 

He dropped the corpse and watched as, once again, his body was absorbed by the ink. Just in case, he waited a moment, but nothing else happened. 

Perhaps there really had been two intruders, twins or something. 

Not five minutes later, Bendy started down the stairs in Heavenly Toys, only to freeze halfway. It was him, again! The same man, for the third time, was wandering around his studio. With a justifiably angry screech, Bendy took off after him, only to lose him in a nearby stairwell. 

Fuming, he extended his senses. _There_. The sneaky little intruder was heading for Level P. 

Though it was entirely against the game’s rules, Bendy fairly charged out of his inky portal and barreled into the man, taking his look of fearful shock in with glee. He crashed the human against the nearest glass wall, over and over, until his head was a bloody mess and he certainly wasn’t breathing. 

Bendy hurled his body to the floor and stomped on it, shattering what remained of the rib cage, for good measure. 

Once again, the ink rose up and engulfed the mutilated body, leaving no sign that it had ever been there at all. Not even a single speck of blood. 

Glaring, Bendy spun to go back through his portal. Just before he could, though, a sound from the little hallway that led to the lift caught his attention. He poked his head around the corner and gasped, his jaw dropping open out of his forced smile. 

The intruder— the very one Bendy had just violently murdered— was sitting on the ground, just visible through the bars of the lift. He coughed a few times, and then looked around. He lurched to his feet with a gasp when his eyes landed on Bendy, and it was the work of seconds to summon the lift.

Even though it took longer for the elevator to get there, Bendy remained frozen, completely and utterly paralyzed with shock, unable to move as the intruder slipped right through his grasp.

He hadn’t even looked like he’d just died mere moments before. No blood, his clothes and hair were pristine— and now that Bendy thought about it, after that first death, the intruder had lost the limp. 

Far be it from Bendy to just give up, though.

Over the next hour, Bendy tossed the intruder over the railing on Level K; drowned him in the ink-filled corridor on Level 11; smothered him again; ripped open his chest; dropped him down the elevator shaft; and hacked him to pieces with the man’s own axe. 

And _still_ , he came back _every. single. time._

Finally, Bendy pried open the doors to Alice’s so-called sanctuary and physically backed her into a corner.

“What’s goin’ on with this human?” he demanded of her, looming as much as he could.

She was trembling awfully, but Alice still managed to glare up at him. “How should I know?” she asked, tilting her chin.

Bendy roared at her, and to his immense satisfaction, she whimpered and slid farther down the wall. 

“I don’t know!” she cried. “I don’t know!”

“Then tell me what you _do_ know!” 

“Boris likes him!” Alice flinched away as he leaned forward. “I’ve seen a lot of intruders over the years, but Boris has never come out of his safehouse before. Not for any of ’em.” 

Well, that was curious. 

“How’d he even find Boris?” Bendy asked, backing off a bit. 

Alice straightened and dared look up at him. “He didn’t,” she said, her voice steady even as the rest of her shook. “Boris went out and found him. After—” she audibly gulped— “the intruder escaped from you and Sammy.” 

Bendy snarled at the reminder. He didn’t like it when his prey got away from him, and for so long too. “Why isn’t he dying? I’ve killed him over’n’over, yet _he_ _keeps coming back_. Why is that, huh?”

She crossed her arms and gave him a nasty smile. “Don’t like being one-upped, demon?” 

Bracketing her in with a hand on either of the corner’s walls, he leaned in slowly. Even after she ran out of room to move back, he pushed forward, until the barest amount of space between them remained. The slightest drip of ink off him would splatter on her, sizzling away at her already corrupted flesh like acid. 

He watched her silently for a minute, every passing second making her more and more agitated. It was only when a tear slipped out from beneath her eyelid— squeezed tightly shut— that he whispered, “No. No, I really don’t like being _one-upped_. If y’know what’s good for ya, doll, you’ll remember that.”

She nodded without opening her eye. Her lips, as much as they could be, were pressed firmly together.

“Now,” Bendy said lowly, sliding one of his hands a little closer to her shoulder, “is there anything else you wanna tell me, before I lose my patience?” 

“He,” Alice paused to take a deep breath, hunching further into herself. Bendy could tell that she knew he wouldn’t like what she was about to say. “He seems to have been rather close to Joey.”

With something close to a howl, Bendy spun and ran from the room, more intent than ever to kill this intruder once and for all. In his experience, anyone close to _Joey Drew_ deserved just as gruesome a death as the man himself.

Bendy found the intruder in the main hall just off Level K’s lift area. He spared just enough focus to turn the ends of his fingers into razor sharp claws before tearing them straight through the man’s chest, fully impaling him. As the body dropped to the floor, Bendy heard a strange noise come from behind him, one he didn’t recognize. 

He turned right as the ink consumed the intruder’s corpse, and so he was able to bear witness as just down the corridor— beneath a silver statue of his on-model form— the man reappeared in a small splash of ink, fully healed. 

Fuming, Bendy stared as his statue’s eyes briefly glowed, and a bright spark of electricity danced between them, then down to the body, jumpstarting his dead heart.

The man shot up with a gasp, coughing. He’d only barely caught his breath when Bendy snatched him up and whirled, pinning him to the wall by his neck. 

Was he being too _kind_ in his killing? Did he need to do something a bit more permanent, like separate the intruder’s head from his body and scatter his limbs throughout the studio? Hang his bleeding corpse from the ceiling and make sure it never touched the ink?

Incomprehensible sounds interrupted Bendy’s musing, and he could only assume that the vile human was pleading for his life, scrabbling uselessly at Bendy’s arm.

He loomed over his dying prey, just close enough, he discovered, for the man to reach out in a last attempt to save himself. His small palm skittered across Bendy’s face and— 

Bendy could see. 

The meaty thud of the intruder’s body hitting the floor escaped his notice, and so did the ink that took it away. 

He could see. Properly, and not through the ever-present haze of ink that never stopped dripping down his face. But that— that was impossible. No matter what he’d tried over the years, _nothing_ had been able to clear his eyesight like this. The ink had simply refused to be move. 

But how… 

Oh. 

Finally coming back to himself, Bendy saw that the man’s body hadn’t been resurrected here. He looked up at the statue’s face, only to watch it flash its eyes at him.

He’d forgotten— they all had, he suspected— that the studio was as alive as them in some ways. It was, after all, the force that prevented Bendy from interacting with the Little Miracle Stations. But it had never protected anyone before, never carefully brought them back after one thing or another had killed them. 

Seemed to have been close to Joey, fiercely protected by the studio, and able to manipulate the form Bendy’d been cursed with— there was only one person that the man could possibly be. 

“The Creator,” Bendy realized. “He’s the Creator.”

The statue’s eyes flashed again. 

Chastised, Bendy lowered his head. Had it been so long that he was truly incapable of recognizing the man who created him? 

This time, when he tracked the man down, he took his time and approached slowly. Bendy’d already scared him enough. 

He emerged from the hole in the wall onto the catwalk overlooking the lift on Level K, right as the bars closed behind the man after he’d gotten off. They just stared at each other for a long moment, Bendy attempting to gauge whether his Creator would be receptive to a conversation after all Bendy had done to him. 

His Creator seemed curious, despite it all, and his eyes visibly trailed over the edges of the clean smear he’d left on Bendy’s face. 

Well, nothing to do but try.

“I’m sorry,” Bendy said, just loud enough to be heard, but not loud enough to startle or threaten. “I didn’t realize…”

They all knew— the few of them who were sentient enough to think for themselves— that the Creator had not left the studio of his own accord. There were a lot of former employees that deserved Bendy’s wrath, but this man was not one of them. 

In the lift, Boris stepped forward, his knees still quivering, to look up at Bendy. The man— and how that made Bendy’s heart clench, that he couldn’t even remember his own Creator’s name— glanced back at Boris, and though there were no words that passed between them, who could better read the mute toon’s meaning in his face than his Creator?

Whatever Boris managed to convey gave the man the strength to take a deep breath and step away from the safety of the elevator and nearby Little Miracle Station in favor of slowly heading up the stairs. 

Bendy waited where he stood with his head bowed, allowing his Creator to set the boundaries. He stopped halfway between the catwalk’s Station and Bendy.

“Is this a change of heart, or just a trap?” his Creator asked, crossing his arms. 

“It’s not a trap,” Bendy said, refusing to meet the man’s eyes, “I didn’t know who you were when I killed you.” 

“Why does it matter who I am?” 

“You’re the Creator. You weren’t here when they all lied and betrayed us.” Out of the corner of his eye, Bendy watched his Creator glance down to Boris, who nodded. “If I’d known before, I wouldn’t have killed you.”

There was silence, then, as Bendy felt his Creator staring at him. Even though he hadn’t known any better, his chest still ached with guilt over the terrible ways he’d killed the man. Bendy hunched over, remembering the cruel reactions other employees used to have to any accidental wrongdoings on his part.

That he used to be about five feet shorter and infinitely easier to punish didn’t matter. Just because he now towered over any human who crossed his path didn’t mean he’d forgotten how he used to be treated. He concentrated on his feet and tried not to imagine what his Creator might do in retaliation for all those deaths Bendy’d caused. 

“Bendy?” he heard from startlingly close, right as a hand landed on his shoulder. He couldn’t help the instinctive flinch. Bendy looked up into the surprised eyes of his Creator as the man asked, sounding distinctly bewildered and a tad like he was having an epiphany, “Did you expect me to hurt you?” 

Hesitating, because he knew how silly it sounded when past encounters clearly showed how deadly he was capable of being, he nodded. “I deserve it, don’t I?” he asked. “After what I put you through, it all must’ve hurt.”

Smiling kindly, his Creator shrugged. “I don’t really remember much about dying, just that I did. Even the being dead part is a bit fuzzy, to be honest. I have a sneaking suspicion that I wasn’t feeling it like I should’ve.” 

From below, Boris made a confused sound, his ears perking up as he tilted his head. 

Their Creator thought for a moment before saying, “Alice said being in the ink was like being split into a bunch of different pieces— like fish in a bowl, I think she said— and that there were screaming voices. When I was in the ink, it sounded like I could only hear them through a wall or something, and I couldn’t feel whatever madness it causes. Like I was surrounded by a thick blanket or something.” 

He frowned. “But there were leaks, bits that came through. Flashes. Alice was wrong. They aren’t screaming. The voices, they’re crying. They’re scared, and in pain— some of them were angry, and some wanted to die, for good.” Bendy’s Creator looked up at him, the sadness in his eyes making a lump form in Bendy’s throat. “What happened here?” he asked. “What did Joey do?”

Bendy flexed his mismatched hands and thought of how many former employees he’d killed with them. Too many to count, in every way possible. “He went too far,” Bendy growled. “And he decided to keep going rather than give up.”

“Is he dead?” his Creator asked, his voice cracking though he was visibly clenching his jaw. 

“ _Yes_.” 

The man huffed and briefly looked away, down at Boris. “How many times did you kill him?”

“Just the once,” Bendy said. “You’re the only one the studio’s ever protected like that. All the others died properly first try.”

Bendy was barely able to make out his Creator repeat the words, “All the others…” under his breath. Instead of bringing it up, he shook his head and asked, “What do mean, the studio’s protecting me?”

“Well,” Bendy said, “you created all of us, and the Ink Machine knows that, and since the studio’s connected to the Ink Machine, it knows that too. You turned the Machine on, so it definitely recognized you, and then the studio knew you were here.”

“Great, a connection to that blasted Machine, just what I need.” His Creator offered him a weak smile. “Don’t know why that even matters, though. I’m really nothin’ special. I’m just Henry.” 

“Henry!” Bendy cried, snapping his fingers. “That’s it!”

After staring for a moment, Henry laughed, obviously having realized what Bendy was talking about. “Sorry,” Henry said, looking quite embarrassed despite his lingering chuckles. “I didn’t even think to introduce myself.”

Bendy grinned, pleased that he’d made Henry— now that he’d heard it, he couldn’t believe he’d ever forgotten— laugh, unintentional as it was. “Understandable, given the circumstances.” 

They both froze for a second, simultaneously reminded of just what those circumstances were. 

“So, uh,” Henry cleared his throat, “what do we do now?”

“I imagine you probably want to leave.” That fact made Bendy sad— though by no means could he blame his Creator for wanting out— but he’d do whatever he could to help. It’d probably be easy to intimidate Alice into allowing the lift to return to the upper levels. 

But then Henry shrugged. “I mean, yeah, obviously,” he said. “But if there’s any chance I can help, I’d rather stay.” 

Even though Bendy wasn’t looking at Boris, he knew his old pal had to have gone as still as he had. “You… you’d want to help? You don’t want to just get out as fast as you can?” 

“Of course! Joey might’ve fired me all those years ago, but this place was my dream as much as it was his. Machine or not, you’re all my toons, and there ain’t no way I’m just gonna sit around and let this terrible nonsense continue if there’s somethin’ I can actually do about it.”

Henry turned and, rambling all the while, started to head back to the lift, gesturing at Bendy, as if he thought Bendy wouldn’t hesitate to follow after him. That he didn’t hesitate— in fact, he nearly lurched after Henry in his eagerness— was neither here nor there.

Boris was bouncing in excitement as they reached the bottom of the stairs, and Bendy knew his smile held similar happiness. In the midst of saying that they’d start by paying Alice a visit, Henry paused to press the Level 9 button. “Ready?” he asked, grinning mischievously. 

While Boris gave him a firm nod, Bendy dared to imagine a better future, one where none of the toons suffered from Joey’s actions, where they had someone who didn’t hate or fear or betray them, where they might actually be happy. 

So when Henry glanced at him, Bendy beamed bigger and brighter than he had in years and said, “For anything.” 

**Author's Note:**

> [my tumblr, if you're curious](https://star-going-supernova.tumblr.com)
> 
> I’m always open to prompts/requests/ideas, though I’ve got a little lineup of things I’m doing for other people already. Feel free to leave something for me to explore! 
> 
> As always, having sold my soul for writing skills, your comments keep me alive! :D

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Renewal (of Souls and Bodies Alike)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14846730) by [Star_Going_Supernova](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Star_Going_Supernova/pseuds/Star_Going_Supernova)




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